“If you deprive yourself of outsourcing and your competitors do not, you’re putting yourself out of business.” — Lee Kuan Yew
With today’s technology, work can be done anywhere, not just within the walls of your company. This new reality opens the door to many possibilities for achieving business goals. For one, you can outsource your telemarketing program. But how do you know if outsourcing is the right decision for you?
If you’re not sure, look for these signs. Any one of them could mean that you’d be better off outsourcing your telemarketing than trying to tackle the task internally.
- You’re Not Achieving Your Telemarketing Objectives
If your telemarketers cannot complete their calls or are unsuccessful in achieving call goals, your program will fail.
So, if you’ve noticed that call recipients terminate calls quickly, it’s a warning sign that your reps may not be experienced enough for the job. Because of their lack of the required skills and knowledge, it’s easy for them to become stressed and demoralized.
Why is this a problem? Because try as they might, they cannot hide their emotions. The call recipients sense your reps’ distress and are likely to lose confidence in your product or service. Prospects don’t want to waste their time, so they hasten to end the call. Even when the potential customer is kind enough to sit through the conversation, he or she often remains detached and unconvinced.
If, however, you were to outsource your telemarketing, you would be able to select a company that offers experienced business development specialists who can express themselves clearly, confidently and persuasively under pressure.
Experienced telemarketers:
- Improvise based on the call recipient’s responses
- Naturally use well-honed, persuasive phrases to capture the prospect’s attention, increasing engagement and encouraging them to take action
- Employ words directly related to potential customers’ needs
- Help solve problems rather than selling, enabling prospects to connect with them and build relationships without putting up defenses against a heavy sales pitch
- Improvise based on the call recipient’s responses
- Your Telemarketers Are Distracted
Does it seem as if your telemarketers are not 100% focused on the people that they are calling? If so, take a look at your office environment.
Perhaps your reps are distracted by noise and activity because they work in the midst of staff from other departments. They may feel self-conscious and are likely to censor themselves to avoid embarrassment. Concerned about what others may think, they might also fail to listen fully to the person with whom they’re speaking and, therefore, do not respond to their signals.
Conversely, at a quality telemarketing company, managers ensure the working environment is conducive to telemarketers. Telemarketers each have their own workstation in a room where there are few disruptions. Not only is this type of environment better for reps, but it also creates a better impression—prospects won’t hear that background noise which can lower credibility.
- Poor Leads and Weak ROI
Your objective is probably to generate quality leads and achieve a healthy return on investment. If that’s not happening for you, it may be because you started with a weak foundation—bad data. Because it takes skill and experience to select or develop a list, this problem occurs all too frequently.
You can avoid data difficulties altogether by outsourcing telemarketing to a professional company. They have the background and tools to provide quality data to telemarketers, making calls more efficient and effective, and saving time and money.
- You’ve Been Tempted by Temps
To ramp up your telemarketing program quickly, you may be tempted by temps. After all, they tend to work for low hourly wages. But in the long run, you’ll pay the price.
Even though you may be getting a good rate, the temp agency is taking a cut of it. It follows that the temporary workers tend not to receive their full worth. Also, by definition, they are short-term employees. Because of their low pay and temporary affiliation with your business, they are probably not fully invested in your business. In addition, they don’t know your company, your products or your services well enough to talk intelligently on the phone and deliver strong results.
By outsourcing telemarketing to professionals, you receive the support of dedicated and experienced telemarketing staff. They know how to talk to your prospects and customers peer-to-peer, consistently conveying your company’s message about the value of your products and services.
- Your Telemarketers Can’t Talk the Talk
Have you ever noticed that your telemarketers are at a loss for words? Or perhaps they are rambling on about product features that are irrelevant to the person with whom they’re talking. Even worse, they might sound like they’re reading a script…because they are.
In any of these situations, you’re wasting money on calls that have a high probability of going nowhere.
You don’t want to prescribe a rigid script because that makes telemarketers sound unnatural and gives them no room to respond to the person they have called. But you do need a robust call guide. While enabling your reps to ask questions and listen to prospects, it should also offer guideposts on where to go next with the conversation. Thus, it ensures reps walk in the right direction, customizing responses to the call recipients’ needs and concerns.
A professional telemarketing company knows how to craft such a call guide—one that suggests the right questions to ask to understand prospects’ situations and how to talk to them about potential solutions.
- Feast or Famine
Do you ever notice your telemarketers twiddling their fingers? At other times, are they struggling to meet project deadlines? If you see any of these issues, you need more flexibility. After all, one day you may need a single telemarketer to call specific contacts, and the next day you need dozens of staff to follow up on a myriad of leads.
Since this type of flexibility is difficult to achieve with in-house staff, you might be better off outsourcing the entire operation.
- Your Reps’ Hours Are Not in Line With When You Need to Make Calls
Just because your team works from nine to five, or some approximation of that, it doesn’t mean your prospects are ready and willing to talk during those hours. This problem is even more likely to crop up if you have an international audience. Even if reps are prepared to work different hours, such flexibility might require you to pay overtime.
If the hours your telemarketers want to call don’t match up with the times your prospects want to talk, you may be better off hiring a professional telemarketing company that’s structured to work 24/7 when necessary.
- More Than You Thought
Whether you’re already implementing telemarketing or just tallying up the costs to do so, you may have noticed something. It costs far more than you ever anticipated.
The cost comes in two forms, time and money. You have to:
- Train your staff in telemarketing techniques
- Advertise to recruit new reps
- Pay salaries, commissions and overtime costs
- Buy computers, phones, automated dialers, software, call monitoring equipment, cables, headsets
- Maintain, clean and offer technical support for all the infrastructure, so it keeps on running like a well-oiled machine
- Upgrade the equipment frequently to keep up with ever-changing telemarketing technology
Beware: sometimes the full costs may not reveal themselves until you are deep into the implementation of a program. It may be easier, less risky and more cost-effective to outsource your telemarketing.
- Train your staff in telemarketing techniques
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